Kevin Shelley Has 'Scored' More Points Than Anyone Else in Canisius History, Even 'Sugar' Ray Hall

WGRZ Channel 2 Story on Canisius' Basketball Stat Crew

When the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name
He writes — not that you won or lost — but how you played the game.
Grantland Rice, 1908

Let the One Great Scorer consider our souls. Kevin Shelley tallies our sins — turnovers, missed shots, fouls — without judgment or remorse.

He's one great scorer.

The 1989 Canisius University graduate keeps track of not only who won and who lost, but also points, rebounds, assists, three-pointers, free throws, steals, blocked shots. ...

"I've seen a lot of good basketball," he says, "and a lot of bad basketball, too."

Last weekend, he was courtside at KeyBank Center for the NCAA men's basketball tournament. Shelley, 58, was the official scorer at all seven of its previous stops in Buffalo this century. This latest one was his last.

"I don't think it has sunk in yet," he says. "I have so many memories."

He also recently ended his career as a scorer for Canisius men's basketball after more than 40 years. How many games is that? He doesn't know, which is a bit of a surprise given that keeping careful counts is kind of his thing.

Press him on it, though, and Shelley does some quick calculations and comes up with a good-faith estimate of all the college hoops games he has scored, at Canisius and elsewhere.

"I'll give you a nice round number," he says. "It's easily more than 1,000."

The lion's share — make that Griffin's share — have come at his alma mater, where he has kept score for almost all of the men's games and many of the women's games since he began on the Canisius stats crew as a freshman in 1985-86. (His round number also includes games scored for the University at Buffalo, Niagara University and Hilbert University.)

Shelley is stepping away from basketball, but he will continue to work football games on the stats crews for the Buffalo Bills and UB. Though nominally done with hoops, he could be coaxed back for a game or two in the future if, for instance, one of his successors should take ill.

"It's goodbye for now, but not goodbye forever if they need me here or there," he says. "Break glass in case of emergency."

Not that he's ever needed a fill-in himself: He says he's never missed a scheduled game for illness or weather.

"But I was late to a game at Hilbert once," he says, "because of a snowstorm."

He has missed just one football game — a Bills preseason game against the Green Bay Packers, in 2005. He had a good excuse.

"That day," he says, "was my wedding day."

At age 10, Shelley began memorizing the stats of stars such as Babe Ruth and Rogers Hornsby from a board game called Superstar Baseball. Soon he began keeping score in the stands at Buffalo Bisons games; when he ran out of scoresheets, he'd beg his mother to buy him more.

Shelley would go on to play football at Bishop Timon High School — he's 6-foot-6 and then weighed 270 pounds — but was injured so often that he began keeping stats on his own, in uniform, on the sidelines.

"I was always a numbers guy," he says, which is an understatement. He regularly rang up perfect scores on his math Regents exams at Timon.

Shelley was a freshman at Canisius walking through the tunnel on his way to Old Main when he spotted a sign asking for students to earn work-study hours as spotters for football games. (The Griffs had a Division III team then.)

John Maddock, the Canisius athletics administrator who hired him, says Shelley joined a stats crew that already included Mike Haim, who still works Bills games with Shelley. And in the coming years came Sam Hunt and Dwayne Dewyea, who've been Shelley's Canisius tag-team partners ever since.

"We have had the best stats crew in the country for years," Maddock says. "I really believe that."

'Sugar' Ray Hall is the leading men's basketball scorer in Canisius history, with 2,226 points. His last game came at the end of the 1984-85 season. Shelley's first game came at the beginning of the 1985-86 season. They just missed each other.

And Shelley has been keeping score ever since. Figure an average of 140 points scored in a college basketball game, and he has 'scored' more than 140,000 points through the years.He worked, at first, with pencil and paper. And then he was ideally suited for the inevitable move into the computer age.

"When I came to Canisius, that was the advent of WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3," he says. "I knew those programs inside and out."

Shelley majored in education, economics, and social studies, then earned a master's degree in education here in 1992. Today he teaches English and social studies at Gateway Longview, a private school in Williamsville that provides education services to children with behavioral, social, and emotional challenges.

"My greatest memory scoring Canisius games is the 1995 NIT quarterfinal against Washington State at the Aud," Shelley says. (It vaulted John Beilein's 1994-95 Griffs into the NIT's Final Four at Madison Square Garden.) "But I have a lot of great memories of all the players I've known."

Maddock had no way of knowing when he hired him that Shelley would still be keeping score at Canisius a lifetime later.

"He's loyal," Maddock says. "He's always there. He's Canisius through and through."

That's Kevin Shelley. He's one great scorer.

Count on it.

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